


Czechic Marionette

by Vert_treV



Category: Russian Doll (TV 2019)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-15
Updated: 2019-10-15
Packaged: 2020-12-16 23:23:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21044504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vert_treV/pseuds/Vert_treV
Summary: In a timeline parallel to the original story, it was Liz instead of Nadia that went through repeated deaths (along with another).





	Czechic Marionette

Elizabeth  
1  
She stopped in front of a showcase that displayed three ascending steps of a fire escape staircase, checked her phone and turned back to push the glass door written “open when owner’s sober” in a curvy, 17th century penmanship. Right, she had almost forgotten about picking up her shoes if she hadn’t been sweeping down everywhere she had been since her work hours had passed. But the letters should have taken a different style. No, definitely not something as though written by Leonardo da Vinci. She took another look from behind the glass door but the letters were still there curled in the same way they did when she was 17 and sweaty from a long mid-summer walk to the Metropolitan. Maxine was there then and now and always. Her sweet squeaky voice brought Elizabeth a pair of black skateboards with a toxic green rubber sole lined at the sides, and at closer look had her own name printed in a very dark shade of green around the heel.  
“Darling, these babes just never get out of style.” Maxine crossed her arms standing behind the counter which was actually a colorful pile of rust that ensembled an old deserted car. Liz was there that night with Maxine, slipped some mushrooms into the keeper’s iced cola and pushed it all the way into the shop.  
“Oh, geez. I was doing that again. Wow. Thanks. Really love it. I don’t know what to say, uh. Just lemme put it on right here. But hey, since when are you saying ‘darling’ like everyone else?”  
“Since when did you get suspicious and picky about other people’s language like everyone else?”  
“Wow. Since when did you get so mean?”  
“And you so aggressive?”  
“Well probably because of some passive-aggressive ex-girl I had got me thinking, maybe it’s better to just be aggressive.”  
“Look at this, you’re almost a humanitarian.”  
“Your tone is suppressing my will to pay.”  
“I was thinking maybe it could be a complementary thing but you are shaking that idea.”  
“Will 600 bucks be enough?”  
“I’m fucking with you. Come to my party tonight, Nads will be there too.”  
“I’ll make you a piece that hangs from the ceiling, goes with this car and is definitely not a fire-escape.”  
Liz walked out thinking about shoes that would never get out of style. Sure, Maxine just released her fall/winter collection and saved the first pair of skates for a closest friend who now pranced at paramount and climax of fashion. But stuff that never got out of style was what people wore and died in and their identical products carried on by those who roamed the earth for another day. These were not technically items but memories and perception of items that had existed before their times. Just like the thing with my vision or memory, Liz thought. It was difficult to tell whether it was faulty perception or faulty memory or alterations actually taking place when she realized things were changing.

2  
“Lizzy hi!” It was Nadia who sounded like she had way too many cigarettes, “do you know what the party’s for because Maxine wouldn’t say a thing.”  
“Try feeding her chocolate and a smoke laced with cocaine.”  
“You should share me some brain of yours Lizzy.”  
“I don’t think you’d want the brain tumors, hydrocephaly and epilepsy. By the way I think Maxine’s divorced. Hence the party.”  
Maxine had obviously sucked the whole life out of her apartment and gave it a new one that was materialized into red neon lights lining the floor and silky black sofas smelling of bondage play. Hayley was in that sofa wearing cotton pyjamas and slamming a whip into the palm of her other hand. “Come here, Lizzy.”  
“Why would I?”  
Hayley approached and slammed her skull into the wall. It got blurry and then there was this girl’s face different from what she last remembered. This was happening again with her memory, and there was Hayley, choking Liz at the throat and forcing her tongue between Liz’s lips, the latter still powerlessly unrecovered from the blow. “Because I can tell you enjoy this don’t ya?” Hayley bit on Liz’s ear as she whispered, pushed her in the gut to back off a bit and brought Liz’s shoulders to the ground and sat on her stomach.  
Then Hayley spat in Liz’s face and retreated to the sofa to check her phone.  
“What’s happening babe? Are you okay?” Liz let her fingers search around for her glasses and put them on, “just, tell me.”  
“Doesn’t bother, you said you don’t like being what, humiliated and fucking controlled and I’m supposed to give you more space, did you not say that?”  
“Yeah, but...”  
“Did you not say that Lizzy? You said that! You fucking said that! Why would you fucking hurt me like this you know I only want you to be fucking happy and you think I want to control you!”  
“Oh god, come here.” Liz walked towards where Hayley sat and took her head into an embrace.  
“I thought the girl you were going out with was taking you away from me and then I thought you hated me. I was going to apologize. Why didn’t you give me that chance? I was fucking given the silent treatment,” she sobbed in Lizzy’s arms. Liz would want to tell her that person was her high-school study group friend but then she’d do what she’d always done again and Liz couldn’t stand that, no.  
“I’m sorry Hailey. I promise it wouldn’t happen again.”  
“Lizzy? Did the sofa say anything?”  
“Oh, Max, happy divorce.”  
“How did you know?”  
“Why the party right? And it’s a very talkative sofa, I’m surprised you never found out.”  
“I hope it doesn’t talk when I fuck after this party.”  
“Alright I’ll make sure it shuts up.” Hailey shut up. She had been talking to Lizzy, mumbling and yelling and whispering and spitting those words, how she had been hurt, tossed and turned and suffered and doomed and in pain, and Lizzy would listen and absorb the world of Hayley’s language that sucked her in and made sure she wouldn’t ever leave. Liz faintly recalled the time they encountered Hayley’s parents, face wrinkled in grey frost as if they had come from a winter in the north. Hayley said they left like the snow. It was a sunny day and they were there but melting away. And then they were always there but that was different, Lizzy would understand.

3  
“Wanna get out for a quick something?” Liz turned her head and noticed a red silhouette of a girl in shoulder-length black hair eyeing her with lips pouted and one fist under the chin. “Find someone else babe.” On Liz's way towards the front door, the girl's red silhoutte suddenly vaporized and ascended into the ceiling, and swirled all about the room, reflected from a disco ball, shredded into little pieces that fell into red silhouttes of people still standing, moving their arms and lips. Was it because Liz had told her to find someone else that she found everyone else, but didn't come to Liz, who had retreated into an unluminated corner. Just like Hayley.  
Those eyes of a python, nails of a dragon dropped to the pavement below a dusty balcony, and Liz realized that she had put an end to that monster, now appearing merely as a 18-year-old girl with dirty chestnut hair drenched in blood, limbs twisted in awkward directions on the pavement. Liz remembered the autopsies, “they called me one morning, it was like 9 in the morning and I was cooking breakfast for myself, frying an egg and I heard she jumped so I left it there and ran over and there were the ambulances and the police surrounding... Yes I used to be her partner... Maybe. I don't know whether I was the direct cause of her death, no I didn't push her or get in physical fights and we are already apart. I wouldn't do it to myself no and I have no idea what she's capable of doing.”  
She was twice that age now, but the second half of her life had been a series of twisted dreams about her first. She got out of the subway, pushing her way past a brunette who anxiously searched her handbag. Liz was walking to the Metropolitan, sweating like the bottle of soda at the side of her backpack but she was cooled somehow by the wind that blew in her face. The wind tipped over the blossoms from the garden of her family's Wisconsin summer house the day her mother got anxious and ran a kitchen knife into her father who was a real-life and bleeding version of McEwan's Cupboard Man. She ran from the kitchen and saw her father at the other side of the garden kneeling by a pile of soil and holding a shoveling, his other hand waving for her to come. Cross over and come to the father you'd never had, Lizzy, run away from your mother and her knife and the Cupboard Man, come, come over to your father so you'd never go look for him somewhere else.  
The subway flew past and Liz had gone to the other side.


End file.
